>Why would someone pay for salaries and servers and then go to a VC later?

We did this exactly. The investment gave us capital to out-pace our organic growth once we had shown that the business had potential at a small scale.

There were two great benefits:

1) It forced us top figure out how to generate revenue from our business very early on.

2) Our valuation ended up being much higher than it would have been earlier in the company's lifecycle.